Going Away

A brief post this time, I promise. This particular point is not a grand pronouncement or revelation. Rather, it's something very obvious to everyone already. I am feeling very sentimental. Tonight for the first time in a while.

Any given place is meaningless. Utica has about 25,000 households. So many of those houses and homes are virtually identical. Levittowns, suburban sprawl, mass-produced structures. Drive past them, fly over them with disdain. Each one is someone's home, and to them it's not the same. The same for cities. Utica is little different in kind from Albany or Scranton or Plattsburgh or even larger cities, Syracuse, Pittsburgh, Columbus. It is not the history of these cities that make them special, not their economies or monuments or landmarks. Only when you leave and become bound by the walls of different gates can you see your lover's veil from without, its true beauty hidden, but not to you. Never to you.

Fire

The Utica summer began on the 29th of May with another portent of the ruin that clear truth foretells and Pandora's gift conceals beneath an artful glamour. The F.X. Matt brewery burned half to the ground, a candle in a final vigil. The serene tabernacle took root in 1888, a trinity of years after Francis Xavier Matt, first of his name, yearning to breathe free in an untainted new world, forsook the Black Forest which had succored his line since first roving bands out of the farthest reaches of Ultima Thule had laid down their weariness beneath the beautiful interplay of light and shadow which those trees engendered.

A sparkle in his eye led Francis Xavier to Utica, never knowing that 130 years later his gift to the world would perish much as the progenitor of its location. No praetorians coaxed up these pillars of flame, but the Matts bear no name but Barca. Generations of love and toil they lavished on their home, but the gladius of fate brooks no consequence it does not choose. The air fills with poison, toxic smog, the earth plowed with salt, prosperity is desert sand. Nothing at all remains. Join your voice to mine and sing the last canticle.

Nick Matt vows to rebuild. The mayor exhorts the people to imbibe in solidarity with their chastened paladins. But no one has ever defeated Rome.


Only barbarians.